Seals are used in many areas of technology. These seals can provide, for example, a protection of a mechanical or electrical component from aggressive environmental media (for example, corrosive, caustic, or under-high-pressure materials). Under these conditions, however, the seals can be subjected to high loads and accordingly wear quickly. A seal on a movable component, e.g., a shaft seal, can also be subjected to a high load. Furthermore, shaft seals in underwater applications can be used where maintenance or their replacement can in some cases be expensive or only possible with difficulty, such as, for example, in turbines of current- or tidal-power plants. Such seal systems can potentially have high production- or acquisition-costs or high wear rates, or fail at a time at which the risk of damage by penetrated water is not or at least only partially preventable.
Conventional solutions comprise, for example, plastic-containing sealing systems for applications in shallow water, such as, for example, are used in the field of shipbuilding. However, in some cases such solutions can cause a too-short service life or too-high costs, for example, due to an expense of manufacturing materials or a complex manufacturing process.
It is therefore desirable to improve a compromise of maintenance expense, reliability, loadability, and manufacturing costs.